The undergraduate of International Business School

Osmanov N.M.,

Scientific advisor - Ph.D., professor Ukubassova G.S.,

Kazakh Economic University named after T.Ryskulov, Kazakhstan

 

The main aspects of application development for social networks

Recently, the Internet has received a huge influx of people from social networks. For today, popular social networks such as “Facebook”, VK (Originally “VKontakte”, Russian: “ÂÊîíòàêòå”) and “Moy mir” (Russian: “Ìîé ìèð”), offers accommodation of custom applications – special programs that interact with users, who put applications on their pages. An important feature and the ability of social networks are applications for them. Created on the basis of various client-server technologies – Adobe Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, C++, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Node.js, and many others. They provide a lot of opportunities for entertainment and user interaction. For all its simplicity, the phenomenon of social network applications has attracted a lot of people ready to spend money, in interaction with them.

At the moment, Facebook is the largest social network in the world. On 4 October 2012, Facebook accounted users are equal to 1 billion – those who came to the site at least once a month or for a specified period of time has been fixed by using the “Like” and tracking cookie. Daily active audience in March amounted to 526 million people – so many fixed by tracking network Facebook daily. Since 2007, not only employees of Facebook can add their developments to the application section, but any user. A large audience of this social network allows attracting the attention of many internet users to the applications, which increases the level of sales. [1]

VK is a social network service available in several languages but popular particularly among Russian-speaking users around the world, especially in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Belarus, and Israel. Like other social networks, VK allows users to message contacts publicly or privately, create groups, public pages and events, share and tag images, audio and video, and play browser-based games.

As of December 2012, VK has at least 195 million accounts. VK is ranked 25 in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the second most visited website in Russia. "ÂÊîíòàêòå" (VKontakte) translates to English as "InContact" or "InTouch".

The resource was originally positioned itself as a social network of students and graduates of Russian universities, later called itself a modern, fast and attractive way to communicate in the network.” In February 2013 the daily audience of “ÂÊîíòàêòå” had an average of 43 million daily users. “ÂÊîíòàêòå”, like Facebook, has a section of the application, in which third-party developers can add their own developments. [2]

“Ìîé ìèð” – another Russian-language social network that connects to the users actions on the page of major portals of Mail.ru. On the “Ìîé ìèð” portal registered more than 40 million profiles, more than 300 thousand people are constantly online. In addition to the main features of the portal Mail.ru, “Ìîé ìèð” also allow you to share photos, videos, and use the various applications and games. You can add your own developments in this social network, as in “ÂÊîíòàêòå”and in “Facebook”. [3]

With access to the data (lists of friends, photos, hobbies, etc.) and high user involvement, applications are valuable tool for business and can contribute to a variety of purposes: sales, advertising, attracting the target audience, building brand loyalty.

Applications are an addition to social networks and expand their capabilities. There are several major types of applications:

·                   useful services, such as calculators, calendars, recipes, rules, traffic rules, and many others;

·                   business applications, and web services integrated into the social network to solve business problems;

·                   games in social networks, focusing on making a profit from advertising and monetization of gaming opportunities;

·                   branded applications designed to build brand loyalty;

·                   application stores that allow users to make purchases without leaving the social network.

A distinctive feature of applications in social networks is their uniqueness. What would be the application depends on your desires, goals and objectives.

There is a specific complex for step-by-step development of applications for social networks:

1. Preparation of work plan and technical task;

2. Design of applications interface;

3. Functional navigation;

4. The administrative part of the application;

5. Programming;

6. Installation and configuration for a specific social network.

For today the rate of market development of web applications is extremely high. Each new month brings a lot of changes in the rules of hosting applications in social networks, affecting the applications themselves. Using the agile development can constantly take into accounting market trends, as well as improving the competitiveness of the resulting application.

The technical aspects of creating applications for social networks:

·                   Each social network (“ÂÊîíòàêòå”, “Facebook”, “Ìîé ìèð”) has its own rules of hosting applications, so first you need to get acquainted with the latest revision of the rules of applications placement in social networks you are interested in;

·                   When you write an application for a social network, you must use its application programming interface (API), to gain access to the account information of the user and multi-user interaction. API social networks are different. Under each social network created its own version of the application.

·                   When you programming an application in addition to API of the social network, it can be used third-party API services (Twitter, Google maps, Yandex locator, etc.) This opens up huge possibilities for combining the functionality of the various services.

Social networks are leaders in attendance on the Internet. With the spread of available mobile Internet, smart phones and communicators, they have become more available to users. This opens up the possibility of using them in two ways:

1.                 Monetizing the actual gameplay, when a user buys a gaming experience;

2.                 Promotion of products through the application. After entertaining interactive interface is possible to facilitate the promotion and implementation of various products.

Reference list:

1.     Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: [Electronic resource] // Facebook. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook // translation to English.

2.     Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: [Electronic resource] // VK. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(social_network).

3.     Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: [Electronic resource] // Ìîé ìèð@mail.ru. URL: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ìîé_ìèð // translation to English.